No Heroes
by TheUlmuri
Summary: Post-assignment, Alex unwinds in a London pub, considering his career and the meaning of the one label that people assign to him most frequently: Hero. One-Shot.


**I do not own Alex Rider. Enough said.**

**This piece takes an entirely new direction than anything else that I have posted. I'm not entirely sure of how I feel about it, but I thought that I might as well post it anyway. There is, in a relatively out-of-character move for me, not a single drop of action or angst or any of my usual genera's in this piece. It's also short, which is surprisingly more difficult for me than writing the long stuff. I kind of took some of the themes and overarching ideas that are present in my longer stuff and ran with them, trying to approach them from a more in-depth perspective. This isn't Alex in action. This isn't Alex in the thick of things, thinking on his feet and coming up with trademark sarcastic responses. This is older, mature, post-assignment introspective Alex. **

**I hope you like him.**

**Continuity: **Alex Rider Series

**Rating:** K

**Summary:** Post-assignment, Alex unwinds in a London pub, considering his career and the meaning of the one label that people assign to him most frequently: Hero.

_"Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster_

_And if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you"_

_- Nietzsche_

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No Heroes

Light filtered dimly through the smoky air of the London pub as night settled about the city. It was a quiet, Thursday evening and the lull in business made the pub the ideal place for one to relax and have a drink after a tiresome day without garnering much interest from other patrons. The dull murmur of voices supplied a steady, familiar background noise that eased the mind and supplied a kind of numbing tranquility that was difficult to find anywhere else.

One patron sat secluded, as far as he could be from his fellow pub goers in the relative shadow at the end of the bar. His hazy form was slightly hunched, as he sat with his forearms resting on the bar and his attention was focused downwards as he fingered the tumbler of alcohol in his hands. His posture betrayed his weariness, as if a great weight had settled on his shoulders and had been there unceasingly for a long time; yet at the same time he was calm, as if he was used to the weight and felt comfortable with its presence.

If anyone had bothered to look, they would have noticed that the man was handsome. The planes of his face were chiseled and defined, yet also strong and masculine. Closer inspection would have revealed that his face was also covered in a myriad of faint scars, almost invisible to all save those with a trained eye. He was dressed in a simple black oxford, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a pair of casual dark jeans. His clothing seemed at once to look natural and unnatural on him, as if— though he looked comfortable and flawless in them— he was not the type to often wear civilian cloths. He appeared to be in his mid twenties but the way he carried himself seemed to speak of a greater age.

The only sound from the patron was the quiet clatter of ice against the tumbler as he slowly swilled the dregs of his Scotch around the glass. He closed his eyes tiredly as his hands continued to move and leaned back so that his shoulders and head rested against the wood paneling of the wall where it closed in behind him, creating his dark hideaway in the back corner of the pub. He released a slow breath, minutely disturbing the dark blond strands of hair that hung over his eyebrows and into his eyes.

Alex Rider sighed quietly as he brought the tumbler to his lips and knocked back the remnants of his drink. He had returned to London only hours beforehand from his latest assignment, looking forward to nothing more than food and rest in his immediate future. The small pub was one of his favorite haunts when he had the time; it was an ideal place to unwind after a difficult assignment, yet simultaneously fulfilled his need to remain anonymous.

His last mission had been hard— not necessarily particularly difficult or violent, in fact he had gotten away cleanly— but it had drained him both physically and mentally. It had been a game of wits, where intellect reigned supreme, and there had been many instances where he had been hard pressed to stay one step—or at least on par—with his adversary. It had taken much longer than it was supposed to capture his mark, and he was relieved that he was finally back in an environment that didn't require him to think, plan, and restrategize at top speed. The constant travel had also worn him down, as he had been forced to hop from city to city, and in some cases country to country, in order to keep up with his quarry.

Alex's mind began to wander to other past assignments as the quiet murmur that filled the bar lulled him into a state that was the closest to relaxation that he ever got. After thirteen years with MI6 he had built a name and reputation for himself that most were hard pressed to match. The intervening years had been filled with countless assignments pulled off with success after flawless success. Colleagues and enemies alike all approached him with fearful respect, always aware of what the consequences of crossing him would be.

Yet his success had aged him prematurely. Although on the surface, he was still every bit the handsome twenty-seven year old he had grown up to be, he had accumulated a wealth of knowledge though his experiences that had aged him in a way that was less noticeable to the human eye and it had weighed him down as the years had passed. Horror, death, and betrayal had all left their indelible mark on his very being and were present in his eyes. Over a decade's worth of scars marred his skin, the remnants of countless fistfights and brawls. Others could be identified as the permanent shadows of knives and bullets, belying the more lethal dangers of his occupation.

Most people, his co-workers included, would praise his accomplishments, citing the millions of people that he had saved and the benefits that the word had reaped due to his work. Most would call him a hero.

Hero.

He snorted at the word, before he waved the barman over to refill his drink.

What _was _a hero any way other than an ambiguous term used to describe a person whose deeds worked in the favor of the society they lived in? It was so subjective; a picture in black and white born of comic book characters and misguided assumptions. The majority of those who went around assigning the term without pause were too blind to realize that their world was built on shades of grey— a gradient of good and evil that was inexorably mixed until neither side was distinguishable from the other.

Because the shade of grey was entirely dependent on perspective.

Throughout his career Alex had taken part in acts that, if done for any other reason than for _Queen and Country_, would have been considered some of the most heinous abominable acts one man could commit against another. He had killed without discrimination or remorse, he had tortured his adversaries and found some level of enjoyment in it, he had stabbed, shot, poisoned, and strangled— drained the life out of his opponents in the most intimate of ways. He had embraced the cooler, more sadistic side of himself and let it thrive; only tempered by emotional control and rational thought.

It made him successful.

It made him unstoppable.

Most hadn't realized that he had bartered his soul for his success.

Is _that_ what a hero was? Someone who was willing to abandon moral code to do what was _necessary_? Someone who was willing to sink down to the level of the very people they had sworn to fight, to sacrifice what no one else was willing to sacrifice, in order to win a battle that they would be hard pressed to win otherwise?

That didn't sound very "heroic" to him.

He had seen it all, and his opinion there was still nothing to distinguish himself from his adversaries. They both lead lives where violence was king. They both committed acts that anyone in the outside world would rightfully damn. They, better than anyone understood that the grey tones of the world were hardly distinguishable themselves and that "evil" was a very necessary and inescapable part of life.

If he hadn't been working for _queen and country _or _the greater good_, he would most certainly have a life sentence in some nameless high security prison where he would slowly rot in isolation. Yet his employers were willing to over look his crimes as long as what he did worked to their advantage.

Truth was that he _had_ done what was necessary. If you wanted to survive, the first thing you had to let go of was moral code. There was no sense in sticking to one when you couldn't trust anyone else to do the same. Morals became part of the deception; something that you could use or discard at will depending on the situation at hand.

It was tiring; conducive to a kind of weariness that was bone deep— yet another reason why the life expectancies for his kind were so low. After a while, most just became too tired to continue, weighed down by the pressure of a long ignored conscience. It caused people to slip up, or just give up and then they were either killed or demoted to the realm of desk jobs and paper pushers.

But it was addictive; nearly impossible to give up once you had been lead into its trap, and for some, like Alex, that alone was enough to overcome the weariness that it instilled. Life became a waking dream, where one was only truly aware when they were in the thick of the action, adrenaline and fear pumping through their veins, awakening them from the monotonous haze that they had fallen into— if only for a little while.

Alex sighed and shook his head, dislodging his train of though as he leaned forwards out of the shadows and caught the single barman's attention with a wave of his hand. He drained the dregs of his drink as he internally berated himself for letting his weary mind wander so far. It did him no good to think about the relative shades of grey that permeated his world.

God he needed sleep.

He had come to terms with the fact that he had become part of the machine that perpetuated violence long ago. It was no longer his job to worry about the absence of moral high grounds and its consequences. MI6 hired him because his upbringing had shaped him into the perfect blend of spy and assassin—because they could count on him to do what ever it took to get the job done, morality be damned.

Alex slid a couple of bills across the polished wood of the bar to the bar man and walked toward the exit of the bar without a word. He paused for a moment as he stepped into the darkness of the London street, breathing in the foggy air before he continued on his way home, looking forward to nothing better than a long stretch of uninterrupted rest.

There were no such things as heroes, but that fact didn't bother him as much as it once might have. He could settle for doing what was necessary—sacrificing his own principles and becoming someone that was indistinguishable from the people that he fought against. He would continue living his life with violence as his constant companion, forever surrounded by death and horror.

It was the only life he knew anymore, the only life he could live.

He would continue to lie idle, only waking, only feeling alive, for those short periods when he embraced the darkness within himself.

**So…yeah. Very different from the stuff I usually write, but it has been floating around in my head for a couple of weeks and I'm hoping that now that I've finally got this out I might make some better progress on my latest chapter length fic. In a way it was kind of fun to explore one of the themes that tends to thread throughout a lot of my writing from a perspective that was more introspective and borderline philosophical. **

**Playlist:**

**Second Chance- Shinedown, The Sound of Madness**

**Tell me what you think!**


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